– By Ebere Wabara
CONSEQUENT upon the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election, obviously won by the late Alhaji M.K.O. Abiola, Nigeria headed for the precipice. It took the fleeting emergence of Chief Ernest Shonekan for some fragile stability and graveyard peace to be achieved.
Shortly thereafter, the late Gen. Sani Abacha came on the scene by dismissing the interim government headed by Chief Shonekan through a coup. The bespectacled General clamped a lot of people into jail and routinely made the prison yards nationwide the habitation of real and imaginary ‘troublemakers’, particularly the advocates for the restoration of democracy to Nigeria on the vociferous and popular NADECO platform.
On the heels of the revalidation of democracy by General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who assumed the country’s leadership following Abacha’s death, it took massive persuasion to get a former national leader to return to power as Head of State. Two of the first dignitaries who visited the leader immediately after his release from incarceration were the former Head of State, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (fondly known as IBB) in company with Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu, my esteemed principal. The mission was to encourage the leader in question to accept the responsibility circumstance had thrust on him with Abiola’s controversial transition.
That trip was long before the said leader eventually became the country’s president and began to tyrannize icons thereafter, forgetting where he was coming from, God’s intervention in his rescue from Abacha’s gulag and his antecedents generally. Astonishingly, almost all the people who played key roles in the enthronement of this leader as Nigeria’s president gradually became his targets for witch-hunt, terrorism and needless embarrassment.
Next is the novelty of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) with its first chairman as Alhaji Nuhu Ribadu. At the outset of this laudable agency, there were dispassionate efforts at rooting out corruption and other criminalities bordering on the economy and finance from this clime. Along the line, the agency derailed and became an instrument for humiliation, intimidation, oppression, subjugation, suppression and demonization of all manner of imaginary enemies and their perceived friends.
So, without recollecting the roles IBB, former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and Dr. Kalu, among others, played pursuant to his disastrous presidency in terms of political strategy and moral backing, this subject covertly unleashed the EFCC on them, including the APC National Leader Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Ribadu graciously confirmed this tendency at the presentation of a book in honour of Abiola by Dr. Tunji Dare a long time ago and further made a testament to futile pressures on him to criminalize Tinubu, among others, at all costs!
Shortly before the end of his tenure as the president of this country, he reopened the missing $2.8 billion Gulf War accruals (windfall) and declared that all those involved in the looting of the money would be tried in scapegoating reference to IBB whose government was in power when the incident happened. In fact, there were talks that IBB may be arrested to explain the alleged misappropriation! That never happened apparently because of the backlash such a jaundiced and brainless inquisition will elicit.
The next victim was the chairman and principal owner of Globacom, Dr. Mike Adenuga, Jr. (GCON). As usual, the EFCC was let loose on ‘Mr. Glo.’ What were his offences? Dr. Adenuga’s capital infraction was wisely not backing a deleterious and calamitous political project! Subsequent “crime”: His enduring friendship with IBB and parleying with Atiku instead of supporting—in all its extrapolation—‘you-know-who’! Not surprisingly, the EFCC furiously went after Dr. Adenuga. What was the additional charge? ‘The Bull’ was allegedly fronting for IBB in the ownership of Globacom! When that yellow script was torn to shreds, the EFCC and its principal could not understand why and how ‘The Guru’ should be the core stakeholder in the multi-billion telecoms project (forgetting that he is one of the world’s 300 richest men, according to April 2020 Forbes’ profiling).
So, the next thing was to get to the root of the suspicions through the beastly invasion of Dr. Adenuga’s home and offices at Oke-Owo and Adeola Odeku on Victoria Island (before he later moved house to Banana Island) in a Gestapo way in search of implicative documents, unsuccessfully. At a point in the ensuing fiasco, the EFCC made a volte-face and said it was IBB’s son and awaiting governor of Niger State, Muhammed, who held his father’s purported equity in Globacom!
The victimization got to a point that when Dr. Adenuga travelled to France for entrepreneurial consolidation and exploration (which is routine, by the way) during the EFCC siege, the combative agency issued a vitriolic statement that he had fled the country to foreclose arrest and the vituperative misinformation spread like a hurricane and people were calling me to find out the truth and the multi-billionaire’s whereabouts as a corporate affairs strategist in one of his blue-chip companies then! Ultimately, the EFCC brouhaha and moonlight tales crashed and terminated like children’s make-believe mud-houses and theatrical paper aircraft engineering as there was no iota of truth in its principal’s weird imaginations and despotic machinations.
The point must be noted that Dr. Adenuga was vindicated at the end of the day. It took the courageous, unquestionable, unimpeachable and trustworthy intervention and royal guarantee of Kabiyesi Alaiyeoluwa, Oba (Dr.) S. K. Adetona, CFR., when Adenuga returned from France shortly after the unwarranted invasion of his residence and corporate institutions to broker a resolution and emancipatory foreclosure of ‘Mr. Glo’ from the unnecessarily vindictive and jealous clutches of the bully when he was in power for the last time! Never again!
Now the vintage message from IBB to Dr. Mike Adenuga, Jr., GCON, on his 60th Birthday, which, I am sure, most people did not flag! It is instructive and partly goes thus: “…The fact that you treasure the virtue of true friendship and loyalty to any cause you believe in gives you the cutting edge. I am eternally grateful for all the troubles you had to go through because of me in the hands of a regime that tried to derail our friendship and relationship.
“Even when you came under severe pressure by that same regime which I helped to nurture (emphasis mine), to blackmail me in order to hang me, you remained eternally loyal and steadfast. Only a businessman of character, sound upbringing and virtue could choose friendship instead of his economic empire. Only a man of delectable poise, with an open mind and fear of God, would choose to sustain an age-long relationship instead of sacrificing same at the altar of avarice, greed and economic interest.
“Such tribulations are prices we have to pay for true friendship…I remain grateful for being a true friend indeed.”
The foregoing extracts speak volumes of the uncanny character of the erstwhile ruler! Do I need to add that the instructive anniversary message from IBB for The Bull—and to the bully—made my day? I read it voraciously and internalized the import of it all. I implore those who did not read it to get a copy (as published by most national newspapers on April 29, 2013) and digest it for personal edification generally and especially for its moral component.
“Big bros, long time,” to use the multibillionaire’s own astounding and overwhelming words to me last year—it is gratifying ‘plagiarizing’ my biggest bros and greatest benefactor at the risk of privacy invasion and exposure! Nna mu ukwu, your golden call-cards and embossed envelopes have become treasured memorabilia on my exquisite study desk in my alluring library which is inaccessible to prying eyes!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SIR!
– Wabara is a respected journalist and writer